In Bess Wohl’s ‘Small Mouth Sounds,’ a Loss for Words Leads to a Gain in Insight

The playwright Bess Wohl calls herself a true believer in New Age spirituality. She reads the books, she does the yoga, she tries to meditate. So when a close friend asked several years ago if she wanted to go upstate from New York City for a weekend-long retreat led by the Buddhist nun Pema Chodron, a teacher they both admired, it was an easy yes.

“I sort of thought of it as more a girls’ bonding thing than necessarily a spiritual thing,” said Ms. Wohl, who wrote the sandwich-shop comedy “American Hero” and the book for “Pretty Filthy,” the Civilians’ recent musical about actors in the pornography industry. “I showed up with, like, my bottle of red wine and my snacks.”

That wasn’t quite the right vibe for what turned out to be a silent retreat, much like the one a half-dozen seekers embark on in “Small Mouth Sounds,” Ms. Wohl’s new play, which has been extended through April 25 at Ars Nova. Aside from the unseen teacher, who lectures from offstage, its characters say almost nothing. Most of the play is written in the form of stage directions, and the audience bases many of its assumptions on nonverbal cues.

Critics have hardly been silent in their enthusiasm. In a review for The New York Times, Charles Isherwood praised the writing (“intrepid”) and acting (“superb”), as well as the direction by Rachel Chavkin (“precise”).

If the 100-minute performance functions for the audience as an exercise in mindfulness, Ms. Chavkin (“Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812”) says that’s part of the point. “The first thing I said to Bess when she and I first met to talk about the play was, ‘It feels like the production will have failed if the audience doesn’t feel as if they have experienced silence for a prolonged period,’ ” she said.

In fact, Ms. Chavkin has included a stretch right at the top. The performance begins with one man onstage, mum, for what becomes an uncomfortable length of time — a means, the director said, of telling the audience “in a superquiet but also kind of aggressive way that there’s going to be a lot of stillness.”

For Ms. Wohl, 39, the enforced quiet on that first upstate retreat, held at the Omega Institute — she has gone on others since — had a couple of unexpected effects.

“Once you get over how odd it is not to speak, there’s something incredibly relieving about not having to say anything,” she recalled on a recent afternoon at Ars Nova. “I also pretty much immediately thought, ‘This is a great setting for a play.’

“Everyone comes there with this great need to be transformed or to find an answer or to somehow alleviate the pain of living,” she said. “And then there’s this great obstacle, which is that you can’t speak.”

That combination made the setup inherently dramatic, and major life questions were built in. But forbidding her characters to talk was also an impediment she wanted to place in her own path as a playwright, to break herself of reliance on clever dialogue.

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The actors in the play “Small Mouth Sounds,” including, from left, Erik Lochtefeld, Brad Heberlee, Jessica Almasy and Babak Tafti, say almost nothing.CreditJulieta Cervantes for The New York Times

“I’ve written other plays where people sort of banter,” said Ms. Wohl, who is quick to laugh, including at herself. She has been bouncing lately between New York and Boston, where the pilot of her ABC police drama, “Broad Squad,” has been filming.

“You can get lost as a writer in the fun of tossing words around and coming up with snappy comebacks that feel really satisfying but ultimately sometimes can be more about your own voice as a writer than really about the character,” she said.

Writing stage directions had always been a chore for her, and once she decided to build a play on them, she entered an especially tricky creative space. Actors and directors often treat stage directions as nothing more than suggestions, but in “Small Mouth Sounds” they are both structure and substance.

“There’s a slippery line between what is staging and what is writing in this,” Ms. Chavkin, 34, said. “We had to be careful not to rewrite Bess’s play.”

Ms. Wohl, meanwhile, had to be careful to write enough for the actors to go on. In taking language away from the characters, she took a tool away from the cast members, who would ordinarily use dialogue to help them understand their roles.

For “Small Mouth Sounds,” Ms. Wohl wrote a detailed description of each character’s history and everyday life — most of which the audience never learns. A 300-word breakdown on Judy, a magazine editor played by Sakina Jaffrey (“House of Cards”), includes her habit of walking “on the treadmill while watching Fox News. She finds that building up a healthy rage in the morning helps her greet the day.”

The humor and depth of the character descriptions are part of what made Ms. Jaffrey “desperate” to do the play, as she put it. “I think I have maybe 16 lines, if you count oohs and ahs,” she said.

Those oohs and ahs are some of the mouth sounds that constitute much of the dialogue — “all of the little groans and moans and snores and laughs and cries” that people make when they’re not talking, Ms. Wohl said.

She wrote “Small Mouth Sounds” in a writers’ group at Ars Nova, and it had a shorter path to production than any of her other plays. Even so, she insists that initially she was trying — as a protest against the reading-driven development process in American theater — to write an unproducible play, one that would have to be staged, not simply read, in order to be understood.

But there was also this: Silence onstage made Ms. Wohl antsy. She wanted to fix that.

“I thought, ‘O.K., can I just teach myself as a writer to stay, listen, be patient, not necessarily know where I’m going when I start out and just sort of stay with my feelings?’ ” she said.

“That’s a huge part of what the characters are trying to learn in the play, but it was also what I was trying to teach myself.”

A version of this article appears in print on , Section C, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: A Loss for Words, a Gain in Insight. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe